“You ready, Johnboy? This is where the tough get going.”
“I guess.”
“I’ve been following him around all day. He’s been in town with Vivian getting more signatures for his fucking petition.” Gareth nodded down the street at the theater. “Now they’re watching a movie. They just went in-that gives us a couple of hours.”
“To do what?”
“They’re using Vivian’s van-she’s been driving, like the good little pig she is. Which means Tripp’s car is back at his place.”
Gareth took his cell phone out and turned it off.
“Yours too, dude. Don’t want to be traced.”
He started the Jeep and made a U-turn and we drove north out of Old Town, out of Oakridge, and into the belt of forest that separated the Slopes from the town. It was BLM land here and there were no houses among the trees. The only traffic that used the road was either tourists or people who lived in, or worked for, the big houses higher up. But it was late in the year now and there were few tourists visiting Oakridge and we didn’t see a single other car.
We didn’t speak until Gareth pulled the Jeep off the road, into a fire trail a half mile short of where the houses of the Slopes began. The land here was steep and as the car made the turn I looked back over my shoulder, down the stretch of road we’d just traveled up, and saw a long narrow straight that made a right-hand turn at the bottom so tight it looked like the road dead-ended in a solid wall of trees. We bounced along the trail for several hundred yards then Gareth stopped the Jeep and got out. He took a backpack from the backseat and slung it over his shoulder.
“End of the line, Johnny. We have to walk from here, I don’t want anyone seeing the car.”
“Through the forest?”
“Yeah. Tripp’s on Eyrie. That’s off the road we just came up, another half mile or so. And his place is about five hundred yards along it. So all we have to do is head uphill from here and we should hit his backyard.”
Gareth took a compass from his pocket, checked the direction, and stepped off the trail into the trees. The forest here felt threatening. It was a place men did not usually come and it seemed to me that our presence violated the way things were supposed to be.
Whatever Gareth had in his backpack made a metallic clinking, and that and the forest and what we were going to do started to work on me. I began to picture one horrific bludgeoning scene after another.
Gareth must have seen the fear on my face.
“Relax, dude, we’re not going to chop him into pieces or anything. All we’re going to do is make a little alteration to that fancy car of his and then he’s going to have an accident.” Gareth held up his hands. “Totally hands-off.”
We continued our way through the forest. The ground was steep and covered with a thick carpet of dry brown pine needles that slipped under our feet. We made slow progress. I kept my eyes on the ground as much as I could and tried to convince myself that killing someone by engineering an accident wasn’t quite as bad as stabbing the life out of them.
It took us half an hour to get level with the properties on the downhill side of Eyrie Street. Gareth’s navigation was slightly off and because we couldn’t see more than twenty yards on either side of us we unknowingly walked through a corridor of forest between two properties and almost blundered out onto the road. From there, though, we got our bearings and it only took us another couple of minutes to backtrack and find the rear border of Jeremy Tripp’s garden.
We stood hidden at the edge of the trees looking out at the bright expanse of lawn. The archery target was there, and on a table on the deck the pages of a magazine lifted lazily as a light breeze caught them. The house was still and quiet.
Gareth nodded toward the carport at the side of the house. The top on Jeremy Tripp’s V12 E-type Jaguar roadster was down and the heavy chrome frame along the upper edge of its windshield caught a stray shaft of sun and made a single bright highlight in the shade.
“That’s going to make things easier, I thought we’d have to break into a garage. We better hurry up, though. If they come back right after the movie we only have an hour or so.”
We stepped out into the light of the garden and although neither it nor the house was overlooked by any of the neighboring properties I felt immediately that we were on show to the world. We walked quickly along the left edge of the garden and into the carport. The open structure was shielded from view on one side by the forest, and on the other by the house. The hedge out front covered us from the road.
Gareth took a flashlight from his backpack, then lay down on the concrete floor so that, by angling his head, he could see behind one of the car’s chrome-wire front wheels. He pulled his head back and sat up.
“Good.”
He took a fine metal file out of the pack and leaned back under the car. For the next couple of minutes he filed gently at something on the other side of the wheel. He stopped regularly and checked his work with the flashlight. When he was satisfied he reached out toward me with one hand.
“There’s a bottle in there. Be careful with it.”
I opened the backpack. Inside was a small collection of loose tools, a pair of industrial rubber gloves, a three-foot length of steel pipe about an inch in diameter, a wad of something that looked like cotton wool, and a small bottle covered with bubble wrap. The bottle had a ground-glass stopper like the sort old-fashioned drugstores display in their windows and it was half full of a colorless liquid. I pulled the bubble wrap off it and handed it to Gareth.
“What is it?”
“Nitric acid. Give me the gloves and that wool stuff.”
I passed over what he wanted and as he pulled on the gloves he outlined what he was going to do.
“The brake lines carry brake fluid from a master cylinder to the brakes on each wheel. When you put your foot on the brake pedal it increases the pressure on the fluid and this transfers to sets of calipers which squeeze the brake pads against the discs and slow the car. Of course, if there’s a hole in the brake lines then brake fluid squirts out when you put the brakes on and your brakes, they don’t work so good no more. We could just cut the brake line, but that would look a tad suspicious. What I want to do is make them just thin enough so that when he brakes hard they rupture. The acid removes the file marks and eats through more of the metal. You do it right, it looks just like a faulty part. It’s pretty hard to judge with this stuff, though, but if I use too much his brakes will still be fucked and we’ll just have to hope he doesn’t notice the leak till it’s too late.”
Gareth pulled a piece of the cotton-like material off the main wad and held it up to me.
“Glass wool. They use it in fish tank filters. It’s the only thing you can use as a sponge with acid.”
He twisted the stopper out of the bottle and carefully wet the glass wool with several drops of acid. Then he lay down and reached behind the wheel again. I lay head-on to the front of the car and watched as he stroked an angled metal pipe about a quarter-inch diameter with the acid. Thin white fumes hazed the outline of the pipe after each pass.
When he’d finished with that wheel, Gareth did the same to the one on the other side. Then he went back and checked the first.
“Okay, I guess. Take a look.”
He moved away and I took his place. The brake line was still intact but it now appeared to be sweating beads of reddish-brown liquid along three or four inches of its length.
Gareth stuffed the used glass wool into the acid bottle, stoppered it again, and returned everything to the backpack.